Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate and you are in a location you may not be back to in a while. With the case of the last day in Rome, it was very overcast and raining. The light was flat which didn’t give me much to work with in color. Because of the time period of the subject and location, the romantic feeling of the Rome architecture lends itself well to black and white.
To challenge me and to make an interesting photograph I slowed (dragged the shutter) by setting the f-stop to f/22 to create a 1 second exposure. This created the water blur effect. What was interesting with this photograph (and because I was lazy), I took this picture hand-held using proper hand-holding technique without a tripod. With the new Nikon Z 7with FTZ, this was also aided with the combined VR vibration reduction in the Nikkor 24-120mm lens and the camera’s internal VR motor which adds a 5th-axis vibration reduction.
The other reason I used B&W was to take advantage of that moody sky. It fills the blank space in the upper right part of the frame and adds drama to the scene. I just cranked up the clarity and structure on the monochrome color setting in the Z 7 and moved the clarity slider in ACR.